Telecommunications services are critical to a wide variety of industries and daily activities, and have long been integral to the functioning of society. For example it is well documented that voice, data and multimedia applications have all proven to be useful in one circumstance or another. Indeed, there is a rapidly increasing demand to integrate these various types of applications into a seamless fabric of telecommunication services. While the trend toward integrated telecommunication services is quite desirable to the consumer, a number of challenges remain.
From a telecommunication standpoint, the integration of the above and other applications has been facilitated by the evolution from traditional analog networks to broadband networks. Broadband networks use digital technology to make more efficient use of the transmission capacity of the physical architecture being used. For example, broadband architectures based on cable, hybrid fiber coaxial cable (HFC) and the digital subscriber line family of technologies (xDSL) have enabled leased line transmission rates in excess of 1.544 Mbs (i.e., T1+). Thus, higher transmission rates have provided an opportunity to increase the number and quality of telecommunication services available to the end user. It should be noted, however, that conventional approaches to managing these services need to be improved. For example, the service criteria associated with integrated telecommunication applications enabled by broadband networks can be too complicated for traditional circuit switch approaches to establishing links. Establishing telecommunication links is particularly important when dealing with mobile terminals such as laptop, personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular phones, etc. Unfortunately, circuit switch-facilitated dial tone and numbering schemes such as directory number (DN), E.164 cannot support the sophisticated user-to-network interaction required to fulfill and communicate all of the service criteria. For example, criteria such as service and feature selections, maintenance of personal address books and directories, profiles and databases, and service preferences are all aspects of an integrated broadband service that might be customized or identified when a mobile terminal establishes a link. Thus, the simplicity of the traditional telephone keypad can not fulfill these needs.
There is, therefore, a need to make use of multi-module user-interfaces such as speech/voice recognition to enable the consumer to interact with the network in a more human/natural, and sophisticated manner. In particular, in dealing with a mobile terminal, conventional approaches are significantly limited with regard to service capability. For example, if a mobile terminal is registered in a remote environment under conventional approaches, the telecommunications service must be provided to the mobile terminal in accordance with the service capability of the remote environment. As a result, a subscriber having a terminal with an associated home service capability (such as enhanced video capability) might be forced to communicate in accordance with an entry-level service such as 64K bps video. There is therefore a need to provide a mobile terminal with personalized telecommunications service capability.